Responsive Design: Streamlining Your Process

There are countless combinations of tools, frameworks, and processes to build a responsive website. While there may not be just one right or wrong way to begin, an outline is a great way to start your project. From the initial wireframes and concepts to the core markup and testing, this guide has you covered.

1. Wireframing

Never before have wireframes been so important. Responsive design presents new factors to consider since layouts are no longer static, but rather dynamic. Content areas need to expand, contract, and move depending on screen sizes. Wireframes provide a quick and easy way to build responsive flows and get a better understanding of your layout. Check out Mocking Bird, OmniGraffle, and Balsamiq. Remember to create wireframes for mobile, tablet, and desktops!

2. Concepts & Visual Design

While it may not be as useful as it was pre-CSS3, opening Photoshop and creating initial concepts and visual designs can be helpful. However, some would argue it’s not always necessary. Just remember, it doesn’t have to be pixel-perfect! Shadows, rounded corners, and gradients can all be created within CSS3 (and sometimes it’s easier to skip over to step three and begin designing right in the browser).

4. HTML5

Although it won’t make or break the responsiveness of your design, the newer HTML5 elements will improve accessibility and searchability of your markup. HTML5 is the first step to future-proofing your website, so don’t take it lightly!

5. CSS3 & SASS

If you haven’t already, learn the ins and outs of CSS3 before you begin. Be sure to use rounded corners, drop shadows, and web fonts. It’ll save you time and help your website load faster. Media queries are the core of a responsive design, so learn how to use them. Create a shared stylesheet which contains core selectors, then add mobile-only, tablet-only and desktop-only stylesheets to compliment the core. Define fallbacks with Modernizr and Respond.js. If you’re willing to invest several hours to save many more, buy a copy of Compass and read tutorials on using SASS. It’ll lighten your load by automatically completing CSS3 vendor prefixes.

6. Markup

Start digging in and writing your markup. Always start with mobile first! (At the least, be sure the markup is optimized for mobile devices.) Responsive websites use fluid widths (percentages) instead of traditional, pixel-based sizing (px). Sometimes it’s easier to build the website with a static pixel width and then convert to percentages later (especially if it’s your first time). After you write markup for the mobile layout, build the tablet and desktop versions.

7. Images & SVG

Bandwidth on mobile devices usually underperforms desktop speeds and is often capped. One advantage to splitting desktop and mobile user experiences is the ability to deliver separate image sizes. Hopefully in the future more options will become available, but right now Responsive Images and @media responsive images are some of the best choices for scaling rasterized images.

If your design includes illustrations or vector graphics, SVG is another option to consider. Similar to the concept of SVG, icon sets can be displayed in a vector format with fonts such as Pictos.

8. Troubleshooting

When beginning your responsive design, rethinking the formats of your content areas is the biggest challenge. You should constantly be considering ways to improve your layout’s format. Check out Media Queries for ideas and inspiration for your layout. As you’re writing the markup, unfamiliar challenges may arise. Certain sizes may have unwanted wrapping text (orphans) or overlapping DIVs and content areas. At this point, it’s all about fine-tuning your CSS to resolve these issues. Look at other responsive websites to see how their designers tackled similar problems. Ask for help on communities such as StackOverflow.

9. Optimization

Since you’re building one page that both mobile and desktop devices will share, optimizing the markup and Javascript for each type of device is important. Although it’s not always ideal, excluding Javascripts from mobile devices is sometimes necessary. As mentioned before, keeping the desktop stylesheet separate from the mobile styles is good practice. Use tools like GTMetrix to find ways to improve your HTML and CSS. Always compress your PNGs (GTMetrix can help with that too)!

10. Testing

Learn to let go. Very few will find the time or resources required to test their design on all of the countless mobile devices, let alone countless screen resolutions and pixel densities. Resize your browser’s viewport to find specific rendering problems. Use tools like Studiopress Tester to get a good idea of what your site looks like on mobile devices and tablets. Just remember, your site will never look the same in every browser, so make accessibility and readability a priority.

Hopefully this outline will help in your next responsive website! While it may feel a bit overwhelming at first, it gets easier with time. Eventually, you’ll want all of your designs to be responsive. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below.

About Joshua Sortino

Joshua Sortino is a UX designer and front-end engineer who specializes in crafting responsive websites. For over a decade, Joshua has been pushing the boundaries of the browser with his mischievous experiments with CSS3 and SVG. You can follow him on Twitter.

Adobe Shadow is an amazing app for testing. As long as your website is online somewhere, you just connect your computer to any mobile device (as long as it’s iOS or android), and any number of devices, and Adobe Shadow will show you exactly how the website will look on those devices, and you can navigate through the website as well. It’s really amazing for responsive design/development.

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